Thursday, September 17, 2009

Progress...

AsI attempttomovebeyond mysuperficialunderstandingofanatomy I've unfortunately had to accept over the past years as I develop other skills, I'm reminded afresh of the tangible thrill of discovery followed closely by the vexing frustration of application. Knowing the proportions of the body is one thing; applying it- something else altogether.

As with all endeavors whether artistic or otherwise, I find the old repeated adage to once again be confronting me daily. "The more I know, the more I realize I don't know". Or as Socrates put it, "One thing I know, that I know nothing".

To discover and comprehend this vast mystery of the human body is but the mere foothills of this mountain. To apprehend it is the real goal. To make this knowledge usable, consistent, and integrated into my artwork is just going to take some time and daily I'm finding that it's probably going to be awhile before I even realize how bad some of these drawings are.

But, as we all know, being able to look back and see the improvement is the most important thing. And I look forward to the next post when I can look back and see all the flaws and avoid repeating them.

Now, I myself am self motivated, but a very poor self-guide. I have the drive, just not the direction sometimes. So I'm choosing to acknowledge this missing aspect of my gifts and have chosen to follow a gifted guide, Andrew Loomis, for this first part of my tour around the human anatomy. I'm working loosely, though singularly through his book "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth", the DEFINITIVE book for commercial art figure drawing. Its days of gathering dust on my shelf are hopefully over, and while I can't guarantee that it will be seeing daily exercise, it certainly is officially out of retirement.

So, I hope perhaps by showing some of these drawings, I'm not only able to overcome the pride of staying within my comfort zones, but perhaps having a little public accountability will help me stay consistent and keep pushing when this gets even harder.

Now for those of you who may notice that the quality of these drawings is substantially lower than many of the other things on the blog in terms of polish, I would love to explain a little. These aren't what I would call "drawings" right now...they're more like "learnings". It's like learning a new language. The anatomy studies I'll be posting, it's important to note, are not drawn from a model, or direct observation, or a book. They're an amalgamation of multiple sources of information, some written, some illustrated, and some sculpted. So are they less polished? Sure, but I'm at the point right now of not trying to draw anatomy, but learn anatomy. Rather than merely "parroting", I'm looking to actually comprehend and form my own "sentences" and "thoughts" later down the line. So, just imagine how long it took to learn a language and how clumsy and infantile our early sentences and thoughts were. If you've ever learned to sing a song in a language you didn't speak, you could probably sing it just fine with proper inflection and everything. But, understanding what you were saying, however, would be an entirely different endeavor.

Hopefully that makes a little more sense and will at least buy me some time to slowly improve the quality of the art as I learn to "speak" more fluently.